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Rubrik vs Cohesity

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Businesses in our digital age run on data, so it’s important you’ve insured it all. If you lose any data, whether that’s due to a failure in the system or a cyber attack, is your business able to retrieve anything that was lost?

If your business can’t, you need to ensure you have backup and recovery software in place to avoid it happening in the future. After all, losing data will slow down processes and operations, resulting in wasted time for your business.

Knowing which backup and recovery solutions to use when there are so many out there can be hard, so we’ve made it easy for you. This article will outline the pros and cons of two data management companies, Rubrik and Cohesity, to help you pick the right backup services for your business.

Rubrik: The New Kid On The Block

Rubrik, the Palo Alto-based cloud data management company, has only been around since 2014, but already it’s become a leader in the global data recovery market. The company offers a range of data management applications, designed to help enterprises better manage, protect and unlock the power of their information.

Rubrik’s flagship product is a cloud data management platform that allows firms to manage and protect all their data in a variety of environments, including on-premises, on the edge and in the cloud itself. The idea is to provide a seamless service for backups and restores – something the firm calls a “fabric” – across both data centres and the cloud.

The range of services that Rubrik’s platform offers is impressive. Not only do companies get a host of data protection and backup tools, but also search, analytics, compliance and archival support.

What’s more, thanks to the way the platform integrates different computing environments, Rubrik says that it can offer instant recovery in the event of a breach. Enterprises can continue to utilise their data in near-real-time, even in the event of a catastrophic loss of information from their primary repository.

Rubrik’s platform is vendor-agnostic. The firm doesn’t require you to change your existing software stack, whether you’re using software on physical systems (such as Windows, UNIX, Oracle Database, MySQL etc.), virtual systems (powered by VMware, Hyper-V or Nutanix), or cloud plus SaaS (such as AWS, Google Cloud, Office 365 or any other cloud platform). In a sense, Rubrik has managed to create a solution that should, in theory, be able to slot right into your existing setup without any overt issues.

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Cohesity: A Converged Approach To Backup And Data Recovery

Cohesity is, like Rubrik, a young enterprise data management and storage company based in San Jose, California. The company, recently described by Forbes magazine as “the next billion-dollar startup,” offers a range of data management services that it hopes will reduce the overall complexity of current storage systems, giving firms something that has “Google-like simplicity.”

The problem, as Cohesity sees it, goes something like this: firms operate a patchwork of siloed infrastructure that doesn’t talk to other parts of the system. Backup, archiving file storage, testing and analytics are all separated from each other in a network of overlapping, and often redundant, software and hardware systems. Cohesity wants to do away with all of that and put customers on a single platform which integrates the whole lot, making the job of IT and enterprise managers much more straightforward.

Currently, firms have different systems for their media/servers, cloud gateways, backup, target storage, deduplication, test/dev and analytics. Lots of components with low interoperability makes it tough for companies to get anything done. Low utilisation and poor sharing lead to multiple copies of the same information/work, and hidden data makes analytics difficult. Analysts often don’t know that they have data available.

Cohesity changes this picture by including Google-like search functionality, making it easy to find data, the ability to create custom queries, and global resource-sharing for ensuring single copies of data. It’s a single platform for all data-related workloads and comes with an intuitive UI that makes it a convenient tool for less-experienced IT professionals.

Rubrik vs Cohesity

Both Rubrik and Cohesity have similar objectives: to unify data and recovery points into a single, easy-to-use platform. To a significant degree, this is something that they achieve. But there are essential differences between the two.

Perhaps the standout difference is the extent to which Rubrik integrates with existing software stacks. Rubrik offers best-in-class data management for applications, allowing firms to use it across a dizzying array of programs. Rubrik works just as well in cloud environments as it does on virtual and physical machines. It’ll also work on NoSQL.

Rubrik allows customers to “choose their model,” giving companies the option of running Rubrik on a range of diverse platforms. You can run Rubrik on any of the major cloud providers, including Google Cloud, Azure and AWS or at the edge, managing replication and offsite backups between remote branches and head office. Finally, you can run it on Rubrik’s own physical appliances, of which the company has many.

Where Cohesity excels is in matters of space efficiency. The company offers industry-leading storage efficiency with the global variable-length deduplication across protocols and workloads. The data recovery provider has a clear focus on doing things with the least amount of cost and energy possible, allowing customers to get the integrated cloud services that they need, but at a surprisingly low cost.

We should note that the similarities between both Rubrik and Cohesity are far greater than their differences. The critical point to take home from this article is that both of these providers integrate several important DR features into a single platform that is easy-to-use and avoids many of the problems that have traditionally dogged enterprise-scale data management and recovery.

Both, for instance, put back up, archival and test/dev functions in a single platform. Both connect to the cloud. And both offer file sharing and analytics, without allowing data to go “dark.”

RPOs are low on both platforms, allowing firms to get the data they need back nearly instantly or in real-time. And both have native application support: you can run apps directly on the data platform.

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The best option for your business

So which product should you choose? It depends. If you have a fixed software stack that you want to keep, it’s likely that Rubrik will offer more flexibility. Cohesity could be the better option if efficiency is your main concern, but you may not be able to integrate your current computing setup as quickly as you might like.

Of course, other factors need to be considered when building a DR plan. Data recovery involves not just software, but your hardware setup too. Both offerings give you the choice of archiving data in the cloud, on the edge and on-premises but ensure it is relatively straightforward to put your existing hardware to good use.

However, they can’t provide a total solution for your business’ data recovery needs. Choosing the right software is important, but often you need the right specialists to help build out the total solution.

Troy Platts

Troy has spent over 20 years helping organisations solve their data, storage and compute conundrums. He is a regular speaker at vendor events and spends any free time he has keeping abreast of advances in data platform technologies. He also makes a mean curry.

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